In recent years, which have seen an increase in the number of patients suffering from various adult diseases such as diabetes, believed to be due to changes in eating habits and a greater level of stress, a heavy burden is being imposed on the daily lives of the patients themselves who must make regular visits to the hospital, and therefore as blood sugar tests become an ever more usual part of their daily lives, the procedure of blood collection itself is receiving more attention as an important topic. The problem of the pain accompanying blood collection becomes a more significant issue in cases where the procedure must be repeated, and it is becoming a serious obstacle particularly for insulin-dependent patients, which include a large number of children. Furthermore, blood-transmitted diseases have become a social problem in recent years, and therefore, in the interest of preventing especially serious diseases such as AIDS and hepatitis, a device has been sought which may allow patients to take repeated blood collections by themselves without undue burden; yet, no blood-collecting device has been realized which can satisfy these conditions.
Conventional blood-collecting devices in common use are devices which cause a powerful impact of a small blade into the tip of the finger, cutting the skin and extracting blood, but despite the mere instant of contact between the blade and the skin, the resulting pain is more than imagined and thus its daily use has been quite difficult to sustain.
Incidentally, devices have been proposed which draw blood by first suctioning the skin and then forming a puncture in the suctioned section with a paracentesis needle; however, it is often the case that the amount of blood taken is less than the amount required for the measurement, and this has created uncertainties from the standpoint of stably obtaining reliable blood samples amounts.